Guest blog: ‘You’re yes then you’re no, you’re in then you’re out, you’re up then you’re down’: the complexities and paradoxes of hybrid working in the Covid-emergent era.
/By Dr Harriet Shortt, Dr Stuart McClean, Dr Charlotte von Bulow, Gemma Pike, University of the West of England
What is the lived experience of hybrid working? How do knowledge workers really define hybrid working? And how have our home and office working practices changed since the start of the pandemic? These are just some of the questions we are asking as part of a new research project that intends to explore the lived experiences of hybrid-working in the knowledge workforce, and the potential role inclusive and resilient workspaces have in helping individuals and teams thrive in the future.
We know that the pandemic has brought uncertainty and challenges to how knowledge workforces engage with and experience forms of hybrid working in the Covid-emergent era. Hybrid workplaces will play an important role in workforce recuperation, decompression, mental health, and wellbeing. We want to understand more about people’s everyday hybrid working experiences, and we are using visual research methods to help us do this.
We are halfway through the data collection phase of our research and over the past few weeks we have asked our participants to take 3 photographs that capture their experiences of hybrid working. We have conducted in-depth photo-elicitation interviews to understand more about their images, why they took them, and what the images represent. So far, our participants have shared detailed stories about being in the office and out the office, how much they enjoy home working but why it is challenging. They have reflected on the blurry boundaries between work and home life and how they negotiate this daily. Some have shared personal stories of going into “unloved offices” and “sad spaces” in their organisations, reflecting on how empty and different these environments can be.
These stories and the images that go with them have so far revealed some interesting interpretations for us as a group of researchers:
a) We have seen how working at home has moved from a temporary, liminal space during the pandemic, to one that is more fraught with identity work as the workspace increasingly imposes itself in the private home. As such, working 'at home' becomes more like 'home working’ – the nomadic workers we often see in the de-personalised, open-plan, hot-desking office, are being mirrored at home as staff become nomads in their own personalised spaces at home. Talking to our participants has highlighted lots of interesting ideas about the strategies and approaches they use to manage their spaces, productivity, identities, and emotions – this is often through the personalisation and curation of their space (some of our participants have made their own desks from bits of wood and old furniture), territoriality and claiming ownership over spaces (especially when sharing home workspaces with family and partners), and their use of technology (deciding what to display when on a Teams call and what to hide)
b) There seems to be disappointment on both sides of an invisible divide – the reluctance to return to the physical office environment has irritated and saddened those who rely on, and are motivated by, the presence of others in shared, collective physical spaces. As one participant shared with us, “I’m a born-again office dweller and I just wish people would come in. I’ve bought a coffee machine for the office…I’m offering drinks to people to get them to come in. I’ve set up a boules game too…I’m screaming out and reaching out to people with a game!”. Yet, the demand to return to the office has irritated, angered and at times worried those who have become attached to the perceived safety of a home working environment – “It’s chaos at work. I can’t get anything done there. I used to spend all day there, but it’s draining, and I just go in, do what I need to do, and go home”.
c) There is a tension between the individual needs of staff, and how they manage their own well-being, and the collective/ organisational needs that suppresses the individual. A lot of this seems to be linked to trust and the fact that despite the experiences of the last 2 years, organisations still struggle with the ‘invisibility’ of staff and cling to a presenteeism culture. It has been interesting to hear about how workers ‘manage’ the organisations’ expectations to be ‘back in the office’ – it seems now, staff feel the need to make their visibility known when they are present at work, as one participant told us “Every time I go into the office, I wear my bright pink anorak! It’s a way of signalling to my bosses, hi, I’m here and I’m in the office! …when I leave the office, I don’t wear the anorak…”
d) And in relation to the above, social inequalities have been exposed; the home working spaces in transformed cupboards, those that have carefully been designed and curated, and the empty open plan office environment that some long for and others dread - all of this raises questions about how we acknowledge and manage the reality and needs of the individual, at the same time as recognising and managing organisational expectations and obligations. How can new ways of working address a louder call for self-determination and self-care within the context of organisational boundaries and external pressures?
Broadly speaking, then, our project reveals how narratives about work and workplace are changing and how we are both challenged by this, but also inspired. The window into hybrid working and what it means has opened in the last 2 years and new ways of working are being explored. In this process, individual and collective hopes of more self-care have been nourished, but this has also come with the danger of disappointment as things ‘go back to normal’ after an intense period of unplanned experimentation.
As a group of researchers we look forward to completing our data collection and analysis and shedding further light on the complexities and paradoxes of being in the office, out the office, at home, moving between the two, and the wider intricacies of hybrid working.
